Earlier this week at the Carthage Film Festival in Tunisia, Much Loved, a film about Moroccan sex workers, made its regional debut. The film depicts lives of prostitutes in Marrakech, their interaction with Saudi clients, and the support these women give one another—living together and arguing over house chores. Directed by Nabil Ayouch, the drama has already been banned in Morocco—and a few weeks before the premiere, its leading actress, Loubna Abidar, was attacked and beaten by a knife-wielding assailant in Casablanca. In a video uploaded to Facebook, Abidar says that the police refused to help—that it was inevitable that she would be beaten and no hospital would treat her wounds. Two days before the film was shown for the first time in the Arab world, a suicide bomber killed 12 of Tunisia's presidential guards a stone's throw away from the film festival center. Immediately after the attack, the government declared a 30-day state of emergency, setting a public curfew between the hours of 9 P.M. and 5 A.M.. The film festival's organizers—refusing to bow in fear—rescheduled the premiere for a daytime screening—the event drew a line around the block and a team of armed guards stood outside, frisking

Stephanie Larsen looks and talks like the girl next door--but the past four generations of women in her family have been prostitutes. Now she's using her story to help thousands of other girls just like them.

Good thing Prostitutes to Parrots' Heidi Fleiss is retired and living with her birds in the desert because, otherwise, she'd have some serious competition with Anna Gristina, her pigs and, oh yeah, her multimillion dollar prostitution ring.